my first august...book review!
Aug. 11th, 2023 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fuckatherineSummer went by with a mayfly heart. I'm knee deep in the bank of a brackish month watching its current slug around my legs, trying to remember when exactly it was that I wandered into its path. June, July gone with the flotsam and flounder. All flat and stupid-looking.
I've done hours of work yet emerged with very little tangible proof. But I am proud of the amount of reading I've done this summer! Four books and three more coming.
NIGHTBITCH / Rachel Yoder
★★★☆☆ (3.5)
I wrote a bit about Nightbitch in comparison to Chouette a while back and my opinion mostly has not changed. I still think that Yoder does a good job of illustrating how motherhood is also a death in which the label of "mother" subsumes the person predicating it. Yoder tries to give Nightbitch an out through a transformation but I can't quite pinpoint why I dislike the execution of it. Maybe it's because I read the book through a lens of presumed whiteness which I do think is somewhat warranted: how else could Nightbitch commit so many social and legal faux pas and not receive one public shaming, one blacklisting, one institutionalization? The clear obvious answer to that is that the book is fiction, duh. But just because you have dog moms running around doesn't mean racism gets to disappear from either your book or your (experience informed) writing. The byline for a Yoder interview states how the book portrays "underachieving as a radical act of feminism" which would be great if that actually happened. Nightbitch ends up going above and beyond in her artistic career and manages to do the impossible of converging her two selves without ever running into the police.
On the other hand I thoroughly disagree with the Goodreads reviews calling Nightbitch a shock horror piece with gore for gore's sake. No critical thinking skills! Girlness is never clean. If you want shock horror go read A Little Life.
BELOVED / Toni Morrison
★★★★☆ (4)
Beloved would be the second Toni Morrison I've read following The Bluest Eye. I initially believed that I liked TBE more than Beloved but that taste has changed. The slow opening pace of Beloved mirrors its setting of heat baked, stagnant Ohio in which we are introduced to Sethe, Paul D, and Denver. I truly love child characters and Denver proves remarkably different from the sisters in TBE. She is both petulant child and sudden woman, mother to her mother and keeper for a dead thing that is only her sister in the worst times. Beloved is deeply psychological and devastating in how the living ghosts of slavery creep upon the presently here. Morrison skillfully navigates the fluidity of time and memory. I also kind of live in constant fear of sexual violence in narratives involving deep trauma and always pray that the introduction of a male character, friend or not, does not end in a violation of our protagonists. I am so thankful Paul D did not torment Sethe any more than she already had been. Beloved is honest in its dread and quiet in its sadness.
AN INVENTORY OF LOSSES / Judith Schalansky
★★★★☆ (4)
At first I was put off my Schalansky's author's voice until I realized that Schalansky was not always herself in these vignettes. I really enjoyed the increasing abstraction of the book and her ability to revive a landscape from memory and antiquity. Loved the Caspian tiger chapter the most. I've always said that I love translated prose because other languages produce certain unique phrases and word groupings not often seen in American-born English. Schalansky balances dense information with poignant prose. I breezed through this book and would read a longer version. Last chapter felt fairly inconsequential; the preface honestly read more encompassing.
SALT SLOW / Julia Armfield
★★☆☆☆ (2.5)
Ooookay I'm getting tired of writing now. Sorry. TLDR this book was simply nothing new! We've all thought about our puberties as animalistic, as girlhood as consumption, of stone-like men and of insomniac cities. The average fourteen year old girl on 2015 Tumblr has had these thoughts twice a fortnight. The prose didn't even save the stories. Too on the nose, not gory enough, Shape of Water was better. The end.
STAY TRUE / Hua Hsu
IN PROGRESS
From what I gathered this seems to be a biography of the author's close friend who passed, one a Taiwanese boy and the other Chinese. I honestly have not read many diasporic stories and San Francisco is a lush, beautiful, and sad place for one to take place. I think about the relationship between Taiwan and China frequently and am interested in reading about its trickledown into more intimate relationships. I'm like 5 pages in so.... we'll see how it goes.
KLARA AND THE SUN / Kazuo Ishiguro
IN PROGRESS
I read uhhhhh the other one he wrote that is wildly famous but I can't remember the name of last summer so it seems right to read one now. Ishiguro always seems to meander a bit when he writes. There is no real threat or driving force past the feeling that something will go wrong which makes me hard for me to keep going at times. I just know that this will be sad somehow. TBD.
Iza's Ballad / Magda Szabó
UNSTARTED
I really need to read more classics and also read from Central Europe, so here we are. I don't love stories about war and honestly have not read a book with war as a heavy novel since Catch 22. I've heard really good things about this book but to be fair they came from TikTok, the same platform that glomped praise onto salt slow :-\. Will update.
I also still have that American Pottery book to read but I'll probably end up just skimming through and noting down clay bodies and glazes of interest. Mood below in ref to Chicago! Hurrah!
I've done hours of work yet emerged with very little tangible proof. But I am proud of the amount of reading I've done this summer! Four books and three more coming.
NIGHTBITCH / Rachel Yoder
★★★☆☆ (3.5)
I wrote a bit about Nightbitch in comparison to Chouette a while back and my opinion mostly has not changed. I still think that Yoder does a good job of illustrating how motherhood is also a death in which the label of "mother" subsumes the person predicating it. Yoder tries to give Nightbitch an out through a transformation but I can't quite pinpoint why I dislike the execution of it. Maybe it's because I read the book through a lens of presumed whiteness which I do think is somewhat warranted: how else could Nightbitch commit so many social and legal faux pas and not receive one public shaming, one blacklisting, one institutionalization? The clear obvious answer to that is that the book is fiction, duh. But just because you have dog moms running around doesn't mean racism gets to disappear from either your book or your (experience informed) writing. The byline for a Yoder interview states how the book portrays "underachieving as a radical act of feminism" which would be great if that actually happened. Nightbitch ends up going above and beyond in her artistic career and manages to do the impossible of converging her two selves without ever running into the police.
On the other hand I thoroughly disagree with the Goodreads reviews calling Nightbitch a shock horror piece with gore for gore's sake. No critical thinking skills! Girlness is never clean. If you want shock horror go read A Little Life.
BELOVED / Toni Morrison
★★★★☆ (4)
Beloved would be the second Toni Morrison I've read following The Bluest Eye. I initially believed that I liked TBE more than Beloved but that taste has changed. The slow opening pace of Beloved mirrors its setting of heat baked, stagnant Ohio in which we are introduced to Sethe, Paul D, and Denver. I truly love child characters and Denver proves remarkably different from the sisters in TBE. She is both petulant child and sudden woman, mother to her mother and keeper for a dead thing that is only her sister in the worst times. Beloved is deeply psychological and devastating in how the living ghosts of slavery creep upon the presently here. Morrison skillfully navigates the fluidity of time and memory. I also kind of live in constant fear of sexual violence in narratives involving deep trauma and always pray that the introduction of a male character, friend or not, does not end in a violation of our protagonists. I am so thankful Paul D did not torment Sethe any more than she already had been. Beloved is honest in its dread and quiet in its sadness.
AN INVENTORY OF LOSSES / Judith Schalansky
★★★★☆ (4)
At first I was put off my Schalansky's author's voice until I realized that Schalansky was not always herself in these vignettes. I really enjoyed the increasing abstraction of the book and her ability to revive a landscape from memory and antiquity. Loved the Caspian tiger chapter the most. I've always said that I love translated prose because other languages produce certain unique phrases and word groupings not often seen in American-born English. Schalansky balances dense information with poignant prose. I breezed through this book and would read a longer version. Last chapter felt fairly inconsequential; the preface honestly read more encompassing.
SALT SLOW / Julia Armfield
★★☆☆☆ (2.5)
Ooookay I'm getting tired of writing now. Sorry. TLDR this book was simply nothing new! We've all thought about our puberties as animalistic, as girlhood as consumption, of stone-like men and of insomniac cities. The average fourteen year old girl on 2015 Tumblr has had these thoughts twice a fortnight. The prose didn't even save the stories. Too on the nose, not gory enough, Shape of Water was better. The end.
STAY TRUE / Hua Hsu
IN PROGRESS
From what I gathered this seems to be a biography of the author's close friend who passed, one a Taiwanese boy and the other Chinese. I honestly have not read many diasporic stories and San Francisco is a lush, beautiful, and sad place for one to take place. I think about the relationship between Taiwan and China frequently and am interested in reading about its trickledown into more intimate relationships. I'm like 5 pages in so.... we'll see how it goes.
KLARA AND THE SUN / Kazuo Ishiguro
IN PROGRESS
I read uhhhhh the other one he wrote that is wildly famous but I can't remember the name of last summer so it seems right to read one now. Ishiguro always seems to meander a bit when he writes. There is no real threat or driving force past the feeling that something will go wrong which makes me hard for me to keep going at times. I just know that this will be sad somehow. TBD.
Iza's Ballad / Magda Szabó
UNSTARTED
I really need to read more classics and also read from Central Europe, so here we are. I don't love stories about war and honestly have not read a book with war as a heavy novel since Catch 22. I've heard really good things about this book but to be fair they came from TikTok, the same platform that glomped praise onto salt slow :-\. Will update.
I also still have that American Pottery book to read but I'll probably end up just skimming through and noting down clay bodies and glazes of interest. Mood below in ref to Chicago! Hurrah!
